The iPad Will Save Print Media

Michael Gerson is a self-proclaimed bibliophile who once loved “everything about used bookstores—the musty smell of decaying paper, the reading copies and remainders, the treasure hunt for a bright volume of an old favorite.” But he hasn’t visited one in years, thanks to his Amazon Kindle, and now that the iPad has arrived, he believes he’s seen the future of print media. Sure, he’s nostalgic, but it’s time to “embrace a new kind of magic.”

“The iPad is one of the most elegant, useful, astoundingly cool objects ever produced by the mind of man,” he writes in the Washington Post. The gadget could save the newspaper industry. No one wants to pay for content on the Internet; even the Kindle’s interface is too “flat and pale.” But Gerson—and, probably, many others—“would be willing to pay a monthly fee for access to a great newspaper on the vivid, touchable, multimedia iPad.”
(More iPad stories.)